Georgia Bean

01/10/2019

It’s a dish I’ve prepared countless times and one that’s usually met with approval: Linguine Vongole. I used to lie to the kids and tell them the clams in it were chicken, but now they don’t eat meat so this time I have to come clean. “What are these, mom?” asks Georgia. “Clams,” I answer in as neutral a tone as I can find. “Oh,” she says, as if this is no big news, nothing troubling.

Some minutes in, Oliver, Craig, and I are nearly done our meals. Georgia, not so much. Fervent twisting of linguine on fork, but shoot, that linguine just keeps falling off. Better try again. It’s so slippery, holy moly. We urge her to stop fiddling. She begins to cry. Not for herself, but for me. “I just feel so bad for you!” she sobs. “I just can’t!” And she runs from the table. She knows how much I love to cook, how much I love it when she and O love what I cook, and she is afraid that I am horribly wounded.

This time, because I knew the clams would be a stretch, there is lentil soup as a backup. My lentil soup. Not our favourite store-bought Amy’s, which contains some secret ingredient that I, too, am addicted to. G recovers herself and sits down again in her chair. She stares down at the meal in front of her, and fairly immediately the neon thought bubble begins to flash over her head: “Not Amy’s Lentil Soup. Not Amy’s! Mom’s! Aargh! Nooooo!!” She cries, and this time not for me. The next, and only, two bites are tortuous. Life is quite difficult at this moment.

Later, as we all watch Blue Planet, I admit that I didn’t think the Vongole was all that hot this time. Craig and O protest, but a great, beaming smile lights up Georgia’s face. “You didn’t like it, mom?” “Not that much. The clams weren't great.” “Me neither!” Such relief; she is not a big meanie, and I have survived. Now we can relax and truly appreciate the giant squid eating each other, and the sharks with terrible rolling eyeballs ravaging a whale that has fallen to the bottom of the ocean. All is well.

02/24/2016

A couple of days ago Oliver called out Georgia on her pronunciation of "supposed to." George says "apposed to" and I love that so I jumped on O when he tried to tell her she was saying it wrong. She's five, and I still want to hear "apposed." I also want to hear "bumember" instead of "remember."

I have had to say goodbye forever to "dweaming," "lellow," and "wight and wong." Georgia's woom is now a room and wainbows are rainbows.

02/25/2014

The kids are now 5 3/4 (Oliver) and just-3 (Georgia), and among other things, this means that it is very difficult to pee alone. For Georgia especially, who is in the final stages of potty-training, peeing and pooing are public events. She talks a mean streak about "privacy" and even uses it as a verb ("I am privacying right now") but it's hard to get that concept when your family whoops and claps every time you sit down on the potty and flings candy at you when you produce something there.

So, it follows that Georgia sees no need to remove herself from bathroom quarters when an adult needs to do their thing. I was tired today, though, and I really felt quite desperate for this measure of sanity. Craig was out dropping Oliver at school, and I pleaded with G for a solo pee. She agreed, to my surprise, and plonked herself right outside the door to wait.

01/31/2013

Georgia Kate Riggs, you are turning two. Two whole years with us. 730 days on the planet. You no baby no more, baby. You a "toddluh" as you say, or even a "beeg gul" if you've done something astounding like climb our full flight of stairs or clear your dishes from the table.

George, you are such a lovable, hilarious creature. We are
finding it quite hard to begin disciplining you (which we had to start thinking
about when you began routinely dumping both your drink and full bowl of food at
the dinner table). “Oh no!” you’d say, and clasp both hands to your cheeks,
opening your eyes wide. A couple of lonely minute-long timeouts in the hallway
have cured you of that, but you’ve found new ways of messing with us.

We’re lucky if we get through the day with three or four full
outfit changes. You have very little time for clothes unadorned by animals, and
other than a brief flirtation with skirts before Christmas, you are committed
to jeans and pants. Socks come off and go on at least twenty times a day, and
shoes are considered carefully before a decision is made. If “Beanie,” your
adored San Francisco cousin and competitor, has ever worn anything you own, it
is always first choice, and a delighted and perhaps triumphant smile plays upon
your lips once it’s on. “Beanie’s pants,” you’ll say, and you feel both closer
to her and as if you’ve taken something away from her, a wonderful combination.

Two days before you turn two, allow me to tell you some of
the things you love:

The moon (you squeal if you see it in the
evening sky: “Mooooon! Da Mooon!” For a while you thought it should be closer:
“Tum down moon! Moon! Tum down!”

Polar bears (this covers all bears: grizzly,
black, whatever)

Cats (“Cattie”) and bunnies

Avocado (you can inhale one in a sitting)

Ham (which could be ham or smoked salmon, and
which is usually met with an “oooh!”)

Being joked with (“Daddy punny!”)

Putting things in the garbage and closing
cupboards and doors (“Dere!”)

Elmo (if we rotate in another show, or book,
it’s not long before it’s “Elmo turn” “I watch de Elmo! I watch mogstas
[monsters]!”

The mirror (every new outfit deserves a run to
the mirror, where you smile coyly at yourself, sometimes checking out your bum,
sometimes lying on the floor to look up from there, and always sticking out
your tummy until it touches the mirror glass)

Your sweet teacher Paula, whose name you said
about 50 times a day when you realized you could say it, and who is always the
answer when I ask what you did at school that day: “Pauya!”

Reading upside down (right-side up is for
amateurs)

Telling me to stop singing whenever I try

Holding hands with Oliver in the car and bopping
to awful pop

Being included in EVERYTHING ("My too! Mine too!")

Dancing with your dad

Playing bouncy up-down with beloved Auntie Kell ("Key-yee! Again!")

Feeding us your awful leftovers ("O-En, mama. Moh? Moh?")

Hanging with your grandparents, all four of
which you adore

Calling GG on the phone and refusing to ever
allow me back on to talk

Candy (such a sweet tooth!)

Some of your mispronunciations we never want you to change.
“Otay” is better than okay, “tar” just as good as star, and “Ahehver” a lovely
variation on Oliver. Speaking of Ahehver, oh my goodness you love him, and vice
versa. You always need to know where he is, and you like to have him near as
possible. When you’re together, you often shriek at the injustices of many of
the things he does (“Ahehver teasing me! Ahehver bugging me!”) but should he
leave, you want him back. And, you tease just as well as he does if not better.
If he’s ever in a mama mood, a little clingy and needy, you know exactly what
to say to ramp him up: “My mama.” If he screams at this, which is 99% of the
time, all the better … you’ll just say it again. Or if he really wants to make
a point, you’ll calmly say, “No.”
“Yes, Georgia!” he’ll cry. “No. No Ahehver.” As many times as it takes to
drive him right out of his mind. It’s love.

Anyway, Miss George, dad is downstairs making you some
delicious nut-free zucchini muffins to take to school for your class (I hate
baking), and I am bone-tired and completely unprepared for your real party on
Saturday (four of your wee friends are coming over for a craft and sing-song
event). But there will be balloons, and there will be cupcakes, and Ahehver is
beyond excited to be the big boy helper. It will be great, because you are two
and we love you so incredibly much it’s silly. Happy birthday, sweet, wondrous
thing.

11/27/2012

Aaagh. So long without a post. Somehow my DNS settings got
reversed, whatever that means, and it took me forever to ask my friend Travis
from Hop Studios to fix it (which he did in an instant). Oliver is now
four-and-a-half and Georgia is 22 months, and everything’s turned up a notch
since I last wrote. Mostly, the sibling deal is ON. Till a couple of months
ago, Georgia was “baby” and Oliver thought she was cute and … kinda lumpish,
really. A creature to be loved, yes, but one with little actual play value.

This is not the case anymore. She is his sister and not his
baby anymore, and she can be teased and made to laugh and cry. What’s more, she
can tease and make him laugh and cry. He loves it. She loves it. And oh my God,
we love it. Georgia’s common refrain these days, delivered in a singsong voice,
is “Dada, mama, Ah-ver. Dada, mama, Ah-ver.”

We are enlisting O’s help when it comes to teaching Georgia
to talk. She’s got dozens of words and at least half of them we actually understand. O was enthusiastic from the get-go about helping, though he employs a slightly suspect teaching methodology. He simply thinks of a word, like
“usually,” and asks G if she can say it. “Ooo-ee,” she’ll say, much to his
delight, but of course it doesn’t mean anything. The other day I asked him if
he could maybe choose objects in the room he could point to so she could link
meaning to what she was saying. He was all up for this.

“Georgia,” he said, pointing to the light on the ceiling,
“Light. Georgia say, ‘light.’”

Georgie: “Chueugh.”

O: “What Georgie?”

Georgie: “Chahlghr.”

[Pause]

O: “Mama! She said ‘Chinese lantern!’”

Georgia has also apparently said “groundhog,” “curry,” and
“seatbelt” but perhaps I just don’t have a good ear.

Despite O’s kind guidance, Georgia is often a harsh judge of
his performance. Should he even hint at crying—say a whine is escalating—she
will move swiftly to his side, preferably with him prone on the floor. Not to
comfort. Not at all. Upon releasing the first note of distress, O will meet
with a small raised hand above his head. All too often, he won’t see the hand
for the warning it is—not soon enough, at least. Too often, he will linger a
little longer on the note, and then it will be too late: that hand will land
swiftly and sonorously on his head along with a stern and meaningful glare from
above. It is so funny, this tiny thing doling out the whoop-ass, that even O
cannot help but succumb to the giggles and forget how much he wanted to cry.

For now. Georgia’s days as the untouchable half-babe,
half-girl will soon be over, but my, we are enjoying them.

05/30/2012

Things are pretty amazing with the kids right now. Oliver’s in a happy place—still karate-chopping, banging, and leaping through life as he does, and yet … unusually mellow and level (he’s normally a heart-on-the-sleeve kind of guy). He’s found his stride at school, having lost some self-consciousness that was making him both overly bossy and quick to feel hurt.

And Georgia. Oh, Georgia. My sweet little pea got restless and has turned into a ferocious, wobbly, adorable, loud tyrant. “Mein, mein!” she shouts, or “Nein, nein!” for anything within reach or sight (it’s definitely German the way she says it, hence the spelling). We can give her a whole counter-full of objects and still she will holler for more. She has suddenly become very aware, at 16 months, that she is part of a family—and by hook or by crook, she’s going to carve some space for herself in it and make us all know where she stands.

Oliver, for his part, finds this hilarious. She can whack him, poke at his eyes, stick her finger up his nostril … whatever, and he will succumb to a fit of giggles. Last night, when he, Georgia, and I were rolling around on the floor (this is what became of my attempt to show him how to do a sit-up), he said—as much to himself as anyone else—“She’s perfect.” It was one of those moments you just don’t forget.

Georgia’s assertiveness coincides with a new period of heightened separation anxiety, which is awful when we’re trying to work and having to leave her screaming with her poor, lovely nanny, but wonderful when we get to reconnect at the end of the day. Just this week, she began insisting on kissing and hugging both Craig and Oliver before I put her down. Last night, Oliver had fallen asleep early on Craig after a vigorous swimming lesson, and this was unacceptable to G: kissing him on the cheek wasn’t going to do it for her. We eventually cranked O’s head round enough so she could peck him on the lips. She smiled with utter satisfaction, then called it a night. “Nigh' nigh',” she cooed, and waved her royal wave.

10/03/2011

I gotta get it down, I know I do. I look back on all the entries on Oliver and I know I would remember less than half of what happened had I not documented it here. But so far, I’ve written so little on Georgia.

The story with G is both more complicated and simpler than with O. O was and is so outrageous that his exploits demand a public venue. And writing it out makes it easier to laugh than to cry; the two emotions are so close when it comes to parenting O. I am rarely, rarely quietly soaking up the best of O: I am hit over the head with it, sometimes literally. He either makes you want to pull your hair out or cover him with kisses. The other day at a christening: “Mama, can you pull my pants up? I just peed under the table with Molly” (and ripped up all the grass to boot). The other night in the tub: Me: “Should I get out now to make some room for you?” O: “No, I love you too much.”

With G, things are quieter. Of course part of that is that she’s only eight months old; but O was yammering and yelling his head off at eight months. G coos, and cries, and laughs, but mostly she smiles. Mostly she concerns herself with letting you know you’re the sweetest thing she’s ever laid eyes on, and every time she sees you, it’s like she’s surprised to have been blessed anew. She looks up and simply beams. You smile back and she looks like she might topple over from gratitude. When she’s really thrilled with something, G succumbs to a fit of snorting and sniffling that scrunches up her whole face and her toothless grin doubles in size. She’s normally a beauty, but this show of ecstasy is almost creature-like in its bizarre adorableness.

Like all second children, G watches her elder sibling closely and is particularly chuffed when she’s allowed to follow in his footsteps, like when we guide her down slides or push her slowly in a baby swing. She struggles for O’s attention when he’s not bestowing it vigorously of his own accord; if it’s won, she gets a look of pure satisfaction and adoration. If anyone’s going to make Georgia laugh, it’s Oliver.

I am writing this in bed, in the dark, with Georgia dreaming beside me. We have at most three nights left before she leaves my bed to be sleep-trained, away from me and nursing, into her crib in another room, soothed for the first few nights by her dad and eventually by no one but herself. It seems impossible. I can’t imagine not sleeping with her, though she now wakes at least four times a night and I can’t function most mornings I’m so tired. In the night, when she cries out expectantly, whether it’s for the first or seventh time, I turn over lightning quick to put her back to sleep. And stroke her downy hair. And hold hands. And listen to her breathe as she settles again.

04/18/2011

Here we go again: the long-delayed, long-yearned-for first post after having my baby … in this case, my second baby, whom we named Georgia Kate Riggs. Just as writing about Oliver for the first time was hard, writing about Georgia is as well, this time for different reasons.

With Oliver, it was the shock of new motherhood that kept me from writing for four months—the paradoxical feelings of falling ferociously in love and not knowing how to claim my new role as mother, which as any parent knows, is a profound, complex, and sometimes tough position—not the cute and cuddly vision I had had of it. Exacerbating this was the fact that—grandparents hold your tongues—Oliver had about the most challenging personality any baby could possess: fierce, demanding, loud, and funny. I could write pages filled with proof points, but this post is about Georgia … and it’s too early to support second child stereotypes.

The circumstances of my waiting to write about Georgia are that—well, I haven’t been waiting. I just haven’t had one moment. Georgia came five weeks early because my eight-month bout of sciatica turned out to be a herniated disc that ended up causing some serious nerve damage, necessitating an emergency C-section followed by spinal surgery.

Georgia emerged into the arms of a very wobbly mom, an exhausted, worried dad, and a patient, brave brother (from whom I had never spent a night apart). I don’t really know what we would have done without the hands-on, tireless support of my parents and later Craig’s, as well as my incredible brother, Dylan, who flew from San Francisco with the blessing of his eight-months-pregnant wife, Nicole, and six-year-old daughter, Eva. Not to mention the endless calls, dropped-off dinners, gifts, and other support from friends and family around the country.

For the first 48 hours, I didn’t get to see Georgia; I couldn’t sit in a wheelchair in order to go down the hall to the neonatal ICU, and I couldn’t yet walk. My mom and Craig were the first to report back on what I was missing: a delicate, peaceful, healthy, five-and-a-bit pound beauty. Still, I worried. Would my shock at the whole ordeal, and my physical and emotional fragility, impact my ability to bond with this baby?

As I approached the incubator, my anxiety melted away. Instant joy. Instant. Despite not being able to hold her, despite all the contraptions helping her cope outside of the womb, I was with her and she with me just as surely as if we were lying together snuggled tight in a blanket. She was perfect, and I was her perfect mom. We were meant to be.

The ten weeks since Georgia’s arrival have not been easy. We are exhausted from the strain of a million things besides the normal tiredness of newborn/toddler care, none of which I will detail. But what we can say is that Georgia seems to know we’re at our max, and is making it her job to be a low-impact, happy baby—her only request is that we never, ever put her down. As you can imagine, we’re not griping too much about this demand.

Georgia has massive blue eyes, a fair amount of light brown-red hair (on its way to being blond, like Oliver’s), huge cheeks, and a tiny nose … she looks a lot like Oliver did when he was a newborn. She’s already chosen her favourite among us, smiling and staring transfixed whenever her big brother is around being a goofball for her. She’s also thrilled to snuggle in to both grandmas’ chests and gurgle contentedly until she falls asleep sighing a little song.

And for me, for now, Georgia is a little miracle who provided the burst of light I have clung to through the medical scare that was and the rehab that is. It would be easy to take for granted her general “good baby-ness,” her relative quiet compared to someone else we know around here. She is definitely lugged around more and we can’t give her the obsessive, unlimited attention that same someone once received. But her acceptance of this only intensifies my marvel at and love for her. She will challenge us in time and present all sorts of idiosyncratic quirks (we can already imagine this from the sideways smile she’s starting to crack) but given all that has gone on in the last couple of months, her gentleness is a wonder.